Milak, der Grönlandjäger

The Great Unknown

Back home, three women fear for their husbands’ lives as arctic researchers Larsen, Svendsen, and Eriksen set out on a dangerous expedition to the Arctic. In Greenland, they hire Inuit dog handler Milak. The plan is for Svendsen to travel north along the coast by ship, while Larsen, Eriksen, and Milak drive towards the far north with dog sleds. In a race against a competing American expedition, they brave snowstorms, crevasses, and polar bears as they weather one adventure after the next. But then their supplies run out...

Critics of the time called "Milak, der Grönlandjäger" the German answer to Robert Flaherty’s "Nanook of the North" (1922). Filmed largely on location in Greenland and Norway’s Spitsbergen archipelago, the film combines impressive landscape footage with ethnographic observation. With their athletic way of filming in the open air, the camera staff from Arnold Fanck's "Freiburg camera school" used the natural world as a key player, even blowing up ice sheets to create high drama. They were helped along the way by a polar bear sourced from Hamburg's Hagenbeck zoo.

Source: 68. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)